


Cradle of our Renaissance

by redfiona



Category: Dark Knight Rises - Fandom
Genre: Future Fic, Gen, Post-Film, Spoilers
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-09-23
Updated: 2020-09-23
Packaged: 2021-03-08 03:21:02
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,471
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26618860
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/redfiona/pseuds/redfiona
Summary: Bruce and Selina afterwards, learning, growing, being someone new.  Living happily afterwards.
Relationships: background Bruce Wayne/Selina Kyle
Comments: 4
Kudos: 16





	Cradle of our Renaissance

**Author's Note:**

> I'd call this gen, but acknowledge others might see it as gen-ish.
> 
> The name comes from a nickname for Florence, I wanted a song lyric but couldn't find one. One line pinched with love and affection from The Killing Joke.

They rebuild afterwards, creating new lives, far away from Gotham. He's an engineer, while she works in something mysterious. People ask her of course, but instead of answering, she smiles that smile, enigmatic, seductive, slightly wicked, and everyone in the room falls almost as in love with her as Bruce is. Bruce himself isn't quite sure where the line is between industrial intelligence and industrial espionage, but he trusts Selina to stay on the right side of it.

It's remarkably easy to assemble new identities. They're refugees from Gotham, no-one expects them to have proof of their identities or any records at all. Everyone knows that all of Gotham's paperwork was burnt during Bane's reign of terror. They get their jobs on a provisional basis, until they've proved that they can do the things they claim to be able to do, which is easy enough.

People recognise him, but Bruce is able to laugh it off and convince them it's just an uncanny resemblance. It's not like it was in Gotham, where the Waynes were royalty, and the papers followed their every step, but some of the coverage reached further than the city limits, and enough people remember what Bruce Wayne looked like, even with the eight-year isolation. The conversation normally goes something like, "you look like Bruce Wayne."

"I wish I had his money."

People don't tend to enquire further. If they do, he says he knows, and it made his life hell in school, back in Gotham, because he's always looked like Bruce Wayne. As far as he knows, there's no relation, but who knew. People accept that. Apparently, he can be very convincing when he tells stories about how Bruce Wayne ruined his schooldays.

If they ran into other people who escaped Gotham, it might be trickier, but they don't. They're not like other people, Gothamites don't congregate together to remember the past. Everyone who got out carries some guilt with them, Gotham is their original sin, and they all avoid each other.

The friends of these new people they've created, their colleagues, people they met in the gym, that nice couple from down the hall, they don't quite get them. Their friends understand why they don't talk about the past, it's presumed to be a Gotham thing, there's even a name for it in the gutter press - Post-Gotham Syndrome. That's not what confuses them. Mostly they want to know how a nerd like him got a girl like her. Bruce absent being Bruce Wayne has happily settled into being a stereotypical hipster nerd. He wears wire-rimmed glasses, brown ribbed sweaters and a beard. He's developed something that looks enough like a coder's crooked back to be convincing - it isn't one, his broken, barely-mended back would never forgive him for that, but it’s good enough to fool people. When they go on outdoorsy adventures with their friends, Bruce is the one who checks the first aid kit, makes sure they have maps and mosquito repellent and checks that everything is stored properly when they are in bear country. He's safety and planning and prevention.

Selina laughs at his quirks, is daring and wild, and wears the most fashionable clothing she can afford on their joint salary. They expect her to tire of him, or him to become annoyed at her, and he doesn't think he could explain why they wouldn't even if they weren't in hiding.

He pretends to have only a beginner's knowledge of climbing, always twenty grabholds behind everyone. He blames his leg for being slow. He's taken to carrying a cane with him, just in case. Away from them, he trains his legs and back so that neither injury affects his quality of life, but he's now allowed to show that it's an effort.

Selina lets him pretend he's an ordinary nerd, and doesn't go so far ahead of him that he can't catch her if she falls. She doesn't, she won't, but he needs that certainty.

Selina brings one of her work colleagues to their regular squash game. He's not sure why, but he can be welcoming.

Bruce is less welcoming ten minutes later, when it's clear the guy's a jerk. It's not jealousy talking, whatever it is between him and Selina - love isn't a big enough word, or maybe it is, and this is love without childhood hopes and dreams, and without secrets and lies - jealousy has no part in it. Even if that wasn't the case, he knows Selina would have no interest in the kind of man who picks on Bob from IT.

"Bob, do you trust me?" says Bruce as he goes to help Bob up off the floor, where he'd been dumped by a cross-check from Chris the jerk. It might have against the rules of the game, but it was a social match so there was no referee. And when there's no referee, no-one ever wants to make a fuss, even when a move was blatantly illegal. Bruce could do something about that.

"Why?" Bob sounds suitably dubious.

"I think I have a way of winning, but it involves you getting pushed into the wall at least three times." Bruce is mapping it out as he speaks.

"If you promise he'll lose, you can break my nose."

Bruce can work with that sort of permission. "I'll try not to hold you to that."

Bruce pulls Bob back up to his feet.

The set up was relatively simple. Using all his power, everything he kept hidden, Bruce could keep Chris at bay. Bob had a decent fade-away backhand, if he didn't force it, and it was all a matter of keeping Chris off balance, playing Bob in and giving him the time to play the shot. Chris had Selina as his partner, but he wasn't using her, and the closer the score got, the less he used her. In the last of the five games of the match, Selina might as well have not been there.

That was a poor use of resources. Bruce's own resources were flagging slightly. He really wasn't the man he used to be. And Bob was crumpled on the floor again, Bruce hadn't been able to give him quite enough time in that last rally.

"Bob, you okay?"

"Are we winning?"

"It's two games all, and we're seven - two up in the final game."

"Then I'm fine." Bob picks himself up this time.

They are going to win this.

And they do. Bob scores the winning point, an unstoppable return that Bruce in his pomp couldn't have got near.

They go for a victory juice in the gym's bar, because this is his life now. Chris is nowhere to be seen, but Selina joins them.

"Are you going to be alright?" Bob asks him, bruise on his left cheek starting to come up already. He is going to look a fright in the morning.

"I'm not going to be able to walk tomorrow and she's going to have to help me get dressed," it's not going to be anything like that bad. Having to pretend to be more injured that he is is a change from the reverse, "but it was worth it."

"Totally."

Selina smiles at them, and it's not a smile he recognises. He'll grow out of trying to analyse everything sometime, finding clues and hiding meanings, but that time isn't yet. He doesn't know what that smile means, precisely, but he likes it.

Bruce gets a partial explanation later in bed.

"It's not like I could punch him in the face. And the company frown on you dropping teammates down ventilator shafts." Bruce doesn't ask what she's been doing in ventilator shafts. He probably doesn't need to know. "There's no policy on having your boyfriend kick his ass on a squash court."

Bruce laughs. Yeah, a bruised ego is better than anything Selina would have done to Chris.

~~~~

There must have been something in the way Bob told the story of the squash match. Their new friends don't look at them with the same puzzlement any more. The rumour goes, or so Bruce has heard it, that Bruce used to do whatever mysterious thing it is that Selina still does but got injured. People like the story, it explains things about them without Bruce or Selina answering questions. It explains Bruce's injuries, scars he's never been able to hide while climbing or when his shirt rides up as he's playing squash.

That's when Selina starts to worry. She likes an air of mystery; you can't trace it back to anything. If people think things, they'll try to prove what they know, look up the details, search for the truth, find their pasts. People knowing who they really are terrifies Selina.

"No, no, that's the beauty of it, we haven't told them anything. They've invented it themselves. Any time we want, we can say 'no, that's not true, where did you hear that?' to any part of it. We have deniability." Bruce desperately tries not to remember the words reverberating round his head, "If I’m going to have a past, I prefer it to be multiple choice!"

In this lack of fear of people finding out, Bruce is the reckless one. Selina would say he always is the reckless one, he deals in the short-term only. Bruce bundles along with the belief that he will be able to fix whatever problem crops up. Selina knows Bruce well enough to not point *that* out, or that it's barely worked so far, or that he's not able to hide that it's not a belief, it's sheer devoted, endless hope that one day he will fix all of the world's problems. One day that tendency might be a problem, this new identity whose biggest problem is an IT mainframe will want more. Already does, he helps out with the community garden and she can see him itching for more. She has plans for when this eventually goes wrong, but now is not the time.

~~~~

They navigate that little wobble in their relationship, maybe not in the way responsible adults might, but in a way that works for them. They withdraw from each other in private, until they've decided what they each think and what they each can live with, but in public they carry on as normal. There's no outbreaks of animal-themed vigilantism, or animal-themed theft, and they sort of get over it, glossing over what happened. Maybe that was how normal people dealt with things, Bruce was still learning.

~~~~

When Bob hears Bruce is taking Selina to Florence, he calls Bruce the last of the old-fashioned romantics. Of course, Bob doesn't know why Florence, and his views might change if he knew Bruce was only going there to check that Alfred was all right, and to prove to Alfred that he was alright. Alfred would be in Florence, even if he thought Bruce was dead.

When Bruce was a child, Alfred always went to Florence for two weeks. Bruce's father somehow made a hash of running the house within a fortnight and was ever so glad to see Alfred back. Bruce looked forward to it because Alfred always returned with delicious Florentine biscotti. The biscuits stopped when Bruce's parents were killed.

It had to be Florence.

Bruce, and Selina, had saved up for the tickets, and that had been a new experience for Bruce. Ignoring his seven-year search for meaning, when he'd not had money to save any of, saving for a goal was a new thing. He suspects that Selina still has stashes of money from her previous life, but, as far as he knows, she's not broken into any of them since they started afresh.

Many things about the experience make Bruce miss his private jet, not least the lack of leg room in economy class and having to change planes twice. If he didn't have to run (or hobble given how the cramped leg room had affected his knee) around Charles de Gaulle again, once would still have been too often. But this is his life now, and he's got to get used to it.

Somehow it works. From the clues Alfred left, and Bruce's childhood memories, Bruce identifies the right café, at the right time of day. He sees Alfred, and more importantly, Alfred sees him. And it's enough. It has to be. Everything is too new to risk it by being spotted speaking to Alfred. Bruce Wayne needs to stay dead.

It doesn't stop Bruce asking Selina to follow Alfred, find out where he's staying, find out from the hotel what address he's given, even if it's a fake (which Bruce doubts), at least it'll be a start. Alfred will have left a clue if he's given a false address. Selina would have been better at the job even if Bruce hadn't been recognisable, heavily braced and limping. Selina had risen to her prominence in the criminal world by being excellent at what she did.

Bruce knows they both promised to leave everything behind and this breaks that promise. Bruce isn’t leaving Alfred in the past and he is asking Selina to do something illegal, which would mean her breaking her word, but Alfred was worth it. When Selina came back with the address, and she would, Bruce would know where Alfred lived. Even if he did nothing about it today or for a month or more, he'd know. Maybe eventually he’d send a letter as a distant nephew or something, Bruce would have to be careful how he contacted Alfred. He suspected people would still be watching Alfred, to make sure Bruce was dead. He knows about the conspiracy theories, mostly that Alfred had done away with him sometime, and that the person who reappeared during the great Gotham disaster was an imposter who Alfred had then paid to go away. Being found might harm Alfred as much as it harms Bruce and Bruce won't let that happen. Better a little uncertainty than any harm to Alfred.

Bruce tries to put it to the back of his mind; he and Selina have the rest of this week in Florence to enjoy. They make sure not to visit that café, or indeed that part of Florence, again. After this, it's back to their new lives, their real lives from here on in. But Bruce is already thinking of ways to stay in contact with Alfred. Maybe a postcard from Paris, bought during the layover at the airport, suggesting another city to meet in. It would keep him in contact with Alfred, without linking anything back to Florence. It would add an extra layer of cover. This new Bruce is learning how to balance risks with his desires. He’s learning along with Selina.

"Sweetheart, how do you feel about Seville?"

**Author's Note:**

> The author has never flown through Atlanta. As you might be able to tell, the author has flown through Charles de Gaulle.


End file.
